


wasteland

by ssstrychnine



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bluebeard Fusion, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Road Trip, F/F, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Thelma and Louise AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-05 10:28:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 18
Words: 11,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5371979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>assorted prompts from tumblr. a bunch of different ships, mostly wives or furiosa-centric, some au's. a mixed bag of stuff i thought i'd post here because tumblr is messy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. capable and angharad in the vault (capable/angharad)

They first meet in the vault. Capable is angry and there are bruises on her elbows and blood in her mouth and there is a girl standing in front of her, ankle-deep in a pool of water. This girl has her hands on her hips and hair like sand and livid scars cross-hatched across one cheekbone and her forehead and laddered down her arms. This girl looks angry and alone and Capable prepares herself for a fight she knows she is too bone weary to win.

“I’m sorry you’ve come here,” says the girl, her voice raw and cutting and not sorry at all. Next to Capable the old woman with tattoos who brought her here hisses through her teeth.

“Don’t frighten her,” she says.

“She _should_ be frightened,” the girl snaps back.

“All the same, you could stand to be more gentle, Angharad,” sighs the old woman, and she disappears down the short, shadowed hallway, muttering under her breath. 

Capable stares at the girl in the water and the girl in the water stares back. _Angharad_. It is a name that calls up something unknown and wild. Or perhaps that is just way the girl is looking at her, like she has tamed vicious beasts and conquered tall mountains. Like she is not a girl dressed in white and locked in a tower.

“What’s your name?” the wild girl Angharad asks, tilting her chin.

“Capable,” says Capable, the only thing she can manage.

Angharad doesn’t say anything to that. Her eyes narrow, and Capable wants to take a step back, wants to hold her hands over her face like that will protect her from this girl who burns like fire, but she doesn’t. She holds herself still instead. She folds her hands together in front of her. Then Angharad kicks at the water, just once, splashing it out to darken the concrete floor of the vault, and she follows the old woman into the shadows, leaving just footprints behind.

They never do fight, not really. Angharad yells and Capable fumes and eventually they both run out of steam. Capable cries on the first night and Angharad holds her hand like it is some huge effort but she doesn’t ever let go. They sleep in the same bed after a while, because it’s easier, because they both crave contact that is given and not taken by force. Angharad’s gaze gets less sharp, less cold, less terrified, and she smiles and Capable’s cheeks burn.

There are times too when Capable looks at Angharad and she forgets how to speak entirely. She sees her and thinks of the glowing embers of a fire and of the cool steel of a razor and of the way her heart beats fast and her skin feels thin around her and she finds she has no words. Invariably Angharad will notice that silence and she will smile and something in that smile with turn some part of Capable inside out and they will settle into each other’s warmth. It is a quiet thing, but important to them both. It helps to keep the worst parts of what Joe does to them from getting buried too deep. It helps to keep them breathing.

On the day Dag arrives, Angharad kisses Capable. It’s something about a new wife that turns Angharad wild again, steel eyed again, blade mouthed again, and Capable calls her down from her terror with soft hands and soft sounds, and Angharad kisses her.

“I’m sorry you’ve come here,” she whispers, like she is to blame, and her eyes are wet with tears and with salt on her lips she kisses her again.

“I’m not sorry to have met _you_ ,” says Capable, and she holds Angharad in her arms until her shoulders stop shaking, and then they wash the tears from their faces and prepare to greet their new sister.

It is not a constant thing. They kiss sometimes and touch sometimes but sometimes they are too hurt to be that way. Sometimes they sit on opposite sides of the room and nurse their wounds. Sometimes Angharad screams and hurts herself and sometimes Capable does not speak for days. They love each other and their sisters but they are also girls in a cage and they take what solitude they can.

Angharad whispers forbidden words and it’s Capable who hears her plans first. It scares her, the venom in Angharad’s voice when she says they are not things, but it’s true too. Terrifying and dangerous and true. Capable goes to Furiosa and they turn Angharad’s words into actions and none of it seems real until they are wrapped in sacking and planted amongst produce. Angharad believes in herself least of any of them and when the rig roars into life her eyes are wide and terrified and she holds Capable’s hand so tight her knuckles whiten.

“We’re going to the green place,” Capable murmurs, pressing her lips to Angharad’s shoulder.

“Yes,” whispers Angharad fiercely. “Together.”


	2. angharad and furiosa as thelma and louise (angharad/furiosa)

It gets away from them both. It starts with a knock on the door and Angharad’s face drawn and pale and Furiosa is only there to bring her a letter that was delivered wrong, she doesn’t mean to suggest they leave.

“A road trip,” she says, folding up the envelope and stuffing it in her pocket. “A holiday away from…a holiday just us.”

Angharad sways in the doorway. Her hand looks impossibly soft, light against the frame, and she is half in shadows, hidden by the dark, empty house. She steps out into the sun. She stands in front of Furiosa and when she smiles all her softness disappears.

“You’re driving,” she says.

It starts out just a short trip. Furiosa knows a cabin in the mountains that’s forgotten most of the time. It has running water and she knows it will be empty. Angharad doesn’t suggest anything, she folds her hands in her lap and she leans forward in her seat like she can see something in the windscreen that’s more than the tar-black of the road. It has running water and it’s empty and Joe doesn’t know it exists.

“We’re not going back,” Angharad says, and Furiosa laughs and presses down a little harder on the accelerator.

Angharad leans her arm out the window and swims her hand through the currents of the air. There is a gun on the backseat, slipping across the leather when Furiosa hits a corner too hard. They stop at a backwoods bar and Furiosa drinks tequila and Angharad drinks cosmopolitans and flips Furiosa off when she laughs.

There are men in the bar, invariably, and Angharad laughs at them and lets one slide his arms around her waist. The fabric of her dress is slippery, it bunches over the man’s hands while they dance and Furiosa slams her shot glass down so hard the glass chips at the rim.

They dance too, Angharad and Furiosa, though Angharad has to drag her out onto the floor. It’s a slow song, maybe, it’s Patsy Cline singing _I fall to pieces each time I see you again_ , and Angharad drapes her arms over Furiosa’s shoulders and Furiosa rests her hands above Angharad’s hips.

“I’ve had too many cosmopolitans,” Angharad informs her, dragging the word out like it tastes of cranberries. “That man wants to take me home.”

Furiosa makes a soft, scornful noise in reply, not trusting herself to speak, and the tequila sits at the back of her throat, sharp and raw. She spins Angharad, who tilts her head back to laugh, and then the song is over. Angharad disappears to the bathroom and Furiosa sits at the bar and runs her fingers over the crack in the glass until the time stretches out too long and Furiosa realises that the man who danced with Angharad is gone too.

She finds her in the parking lot, slapping the man across the face, pushing at his shoulders while his hands slip again on her dress. Furiosa moves quickly and they pull him off her together and Furiosa throws him to the ground. The man is dazed and drunk and his lip is bleeding where Angharad struck him. Angharad is trembling and angrier than Furiosa has ever seen her. Her hands are fists at her sides.

,When Angharad goes to the car Furiosa doesn’t think about what it might be for but then she’s back again, pointing the gun at the man on the ground, and Furiosa can’t move.

“You don’t get to do that,” Angharad says, and her voice is a lightning strike. “You don’t get to _do_ that to me.”

“Fuck you,” the man snaps, spitting blood on the ground. “You wanted it. Bitch.”

Furiosa hears thunder in her head and she is moving before Angharad can say or do anything. She takes the gun and she pulls the trigger and then the air smells of gunpowder and the man is blown to pieces on the ground. The thunder is gone, all she can hear is Angharad’s shallow breathing.

“We have to go,” she says through numb lips and she pulls Angharad away.

It gets away from them both. They drive. Angharad thinks they ought to go to the police, she has more qualms about killing, but Furiosa knows what the police say to girls who were drunk and dancing. Girls who look like they do. So they drive, and they sleep in motels on the same bed, and they pay in cash, and Angharad, her eyes bright and her hands steady, robs a convenience store when they run out of money.

There are men, invariably, who say things to them with crawling eyes. Angharad spits on one who makes an obscene gesture at a gas station and Furiosa punches a motel manager who makes a comment about them sharing a bed. They rip through the desert like wild fire. Angharad’s purse, stuffed with money, slides across the back seat. The gun stays in the glove compartment and Furiosa keeps it tucked into the back of her jeans when they are out.

The FBI are looking for them. They call it a _crime spree_ and Angharad is delighted by the words, inaccurate as they are.

“We killed one asshole,” says Angharad, baring her teeth to the wind. “And it’s wasn’t even my husband.”

“A pity,” murmurs Furiosa.

“I’ve got you now instead,” she smiles. “A wife is better anyway.”

It gets away from them both. The road does not go on forever and Furiosa can feel that they are running out of time. There is an itching in her skin and an aching at her teeth that doesn’t go away, not even when Angharad touches her. The police know where they are, the motel manager and the man Angharad spat at give them up with sneers on their faces. They can’t stay in motels anymore so they stop on the side of the road instead.

“I don’t want to be kept in another cage,” Angharad whispers, on the last night, and Furiosa touches her hair and her cheek and her mouth, and they sleep pressed together in the dark.

The canyon is close, the FBI are close, Angharad is close in the seat opposite and her hair is whipping in the wind. The money escapes the purse and flutters out into the sky behind them and there are sirens in the air and a thousand cop cars on their trail and Angharad is laughing.

“Keep going,” says Angharad, looking out to the canyon in front of them, the empty space where the road ends.

“Are you sure?” Furiosa asks, her heart beating fast and something like victory in her pulse.

Angharad kisses her, just once, hard and soft and perfect.

“Yes,” she says.

It gets away from them both. The road ends and their hands are held tight between them and Angharad is weeping but she is smiling too. They are flung into empty space, in a cherry red convertible, with a gun in the glove compartment and love on their palms. This was not what they meant to do, but it is theirs now. The car and the gun and their love. It’s theirs like nothing else has ever been and the ground slips away under them and it does not feel like falling.


	3. fish and chips (max/furiosa)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> max/furiosa and family and new zealand traditions

They get fish and chips because it’s easy and familiar and it feels exactly right after a day at the beach. Salt skin and crackling batter and ice cream on a cone. The place Cheedo spots is simply called “the fish and chip shop” and that seems exactly right too and they pull up and pile out and only Furiosa drags her feet. Fish and chips is not a tradition to her. It’s just one of those things she isn’t used to yet. Like pies with meat in them instead of fruit. Like cookies being called biscuits and biscuits being called scones. But she goes with them because she loves them and because she’s hungry and because Angharad is glowing with happiness in the sun.

“I’m getting twenty mussel fritters,” declares Toast. “And a lime milkshake.”

“Disgusting,” Capable smiles.

“One mussel fritter,” Max murmurs. “And a lime milkshake.”

“Citrus and milk should not be mixed,” Dag says sleepily, and Cheedo tugs at her braid, and Toast rolls her eyes.

They make their orders: a mass of chips and a tin of tomato sauce and fish and fritters and L&P, (another thing Furiosa can’t get her head around), and they take the newspaper parcel outside. They sit out the back of the shop on a picnic table on a patch of grass. Cheedo and Dag made daisy chains. Toast sucks noisily on her milkshake, halfway finished before the parcel of food is even opened. Capable gets ice cream in her hair. It is salt and grease and sunshine. It is fish with just enough batter and chips that are the perfect gold and pineapple fritters coated in cinnamon and sugar. Furiosa does understand those and she eats two.

Max is warm beside her, the warmth of a day spent at the beach absorbing the sun. He is sunburned across his nose. There is black sand in the hairs of his arms, and in everyone’s eyes and teeth and under everyone’s fingernails. Furiosa loves them all so much she can’t breathe for a moment and she leans her head against Max’s shoulder and closes her eyes. The beach day was a good idea, she thinks, and perhaps she will get used to fish and chips.


	4. bluebeard (the wives)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the wives in a retelling of the fairy tale bluebeard

They are married to a man in a castle. It is perched on high rocks, like the eyrie of a bird of prey, and the shadow it casts seems to cover a thousand miles. They marry him because they have no choice, he owns the land and all the people on it too, and they need his soil to grow their crops. They marry him and they know the stories, of the wives he’s had before, the ones who disappeared into those high rocks and have not been heard from since. A thousand girls lost in those thousand miles of shadow.

These new wives are five. Angharad, who he calls Splendid, with gold in her hair and fire in her eyes, she is the first, and she is married to him draped in white lace like a girl already dead and ghosted. Capable is next, chosen for her red hair and her bright eyes and the stories she tells to children. They have a feast at their wedding and Capable’s lips are purple with wine by the end and she looks at the castle, perched on high rocks, and she thinks that she will die there. Dag is the third, a girl who says she can see the future in the sky. She is tall and slender as a willow branch and she wears a dress of spun silver at their wedding and her dead father’s work boots, crusted in mud. Toast comes fourth, and on the night of her wedding, when he leaves her in her bed, she cuts off her hair and tosses it out a high window. She watches it caught on the wind, thick and dark, until it is lost in shadow. Cheedo comes last, the youngest and the one least prepared for what marriage means. She is married smiling, with a veil and satin gloves that are too big, and he tucks her hair behind her ear.

“Tomorrow you will meet my other wives,” he tells her, and she beams at him like the sunshine.

In the castle, perched on high rocks, the wives discover one another. They each have their own room, with a bed for their husband to visit them, and books and music and art. Dag paints landscapes in shades of grey. Toast reads everything and memorises poems to whisper to herself when it’s dark. Capable decides they should all sleep together, when their husband is in his rooms, and they curl up together on Angharad’s huge white bed, and they fall asleep entangled.

Their husband tells them they must love him more than anything else. Cheedo tells him she does, with her hands behind her back and her cheeks blushed prettily. He does not visit her bedroom at night, she is too young still, and he does not hurt her like he sometimes hurts the others.

“I love every one of them more than you,” Dag tells him, gazing out the window, and he knocks her to the ground, and Cheedo dabs the blood from her mouth when he is gone.

“You shouldn’t say those things,” Capable tells Dag, her fingers braided together in worry.

“We’ll kill him,” says Angharad. “We won’t get vanished like his other wives.”

“He might not have killed them,” says Cheedo, clinging to Dag’s hand. “They might have died for other reasons, they might still be _alive_.”

“He killed them,” says Toast, folding her arms and pressing her lips together.

“And if he didn’t, we’ll find them,” says Angharad.

He leaves them for the first time more than a year after marrying Angharad. She is big with child and her face is scarred in thin white lines, pressed into her flesh with a razor blade when her skin felt so tight she couldn’t breathe, when she felt she would drown in a thousand miles of shadow.

“Don’t open the smallest door,” he tells them, giving Angharad a ring of keys. “If you open the smallest door, I will be displeased.”

He leaves them, perched on high rocks, and as soon as he is gone from sight, Angharad takes the smallest key from the ring.

“We can’t,” says Cheedo, clutching at her arm.

“We have to,” says Capable, and her eyes never leave Angharad’s face.

Dag soothes Cheedo into silence. They are all frightened, they know what he means when he says _displeased_. Angharad opens the door with the key and at first all they see is red. They walk inside and the red sticks to their feet and soaks into the hems of their dresses and then they see the women, hanging from hooks on the walls. Angharad drops the key in fright and Cheedo picks it up out of the red and they run from the room and their feet stamp blood into the floor.

In Angharad’s room they are silent. They wash the blood from their feet and from their dresses, but it won’t wash off the key and it won’t wash off the hallways. They sit on the big white bed. Capable has her head on Angharad’s shoulder, and her hand on Angharad’s belly. Dag has Cheedo tucked under her arm. Toast is braiding Dag’s white hair with hands that shake.

“He will put us on the wall,” says Cheedo, the first to break the silence. “He’ll kill us and hang us up on hooks.”

“We have to leave,” says Capable. “We have to keep ourselves safe.”

“We have to bury those women,” says Toast.

“We have to avenge them,” says Angharad.

That night Dag dreams of the dead wives. They are alive in her dreams, holding their hands out to her, and weeping. There are five of them, dressed as brides, and Dag tries to take their hands and touch their cheeks but she falls through them like they are made of mist. The floor is an ocean of blood that stretches for miles, and the wives are weeping. The key is in Dag’s hand, and the wives are weeping. Their husband is standing with a bloody axe in his hands, and the wives are weeping.

“We have to do something,” she tells the others when she wakes up sweating in the night.

“Tomorrow we will bury them,” says Angharad. “And when he comes back we will kill him.”

“ _How_?” asks Capable, her fear catching the words in her throat.

“We are five and he is an old man,” says Angharad, and it must be enough, because Capable finds her hand in the dark, and holds it, and they fall back into restless sleep.

They bury the women in the rose garden. They fold them up in sheets and they clean their faces of blood and they bury them with flowers. Toast takes silver plates from the kitchen and they place them at the head of each grave. There are no names to etch into the silver, but the new wives gouge out their sorrow, and their hatred, and their love. A woman lies here who was killed by her husband. They each give the woman an item of their own. Cheedo puts a bracelet of clattering stones into the cold white hand of a dead woman with black hair. Capable puts a tortoiseshell comb into the pocket of a scarlet dress. Toast places a music box in the dirt, next to a woman with her fingernails torn off, like she had tried to fight. Dag puts a book of stars in the hand of one with her eyes open, milky white, and a silver ribbon in her hair. Angharad gives the last woman a kiss, and a silver backed mirror, and a wooden ring for a baby to chew on.

Their husband comes back the next day, and he sees the blood in the halls, and he comes to Angharad’s room with his face clouded with rage. Cheedo has her hands behind her back, and the bloodied key against her palm.

“I did not want to kill you,” he tells them, sounding bitter and sad and old. “Give me the key and you can die where they died.”

“Please,” says Cheedo, her eyes shining with tears. “Please give us time to pray, we have betrayed our husband, we must ask for forgiveness.”

“Give me the key.”

“Give us time,” Cheedo insists, and the tears lie against her cheeks like silver. “We cannot die unrepentant.”

“Give me the key.”

“Give us _time_ ,” Cheedo pleads. “If we cannot prove our love to you we must prove it to God.”

Their husband is silent. He looks at them each in turn. At Angharad who has her lips parted and her hands on her belly, at Capable who is still as a statue with her hair thrown back like a flag, at Toast who has her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes lowered. Dag is chewing on her knuckles and weeping silently. Cheedo, perfect and beautiful, has love and regret in every pore.

“You may pray in the tower,” he says. “But if you take too long I will come for you.”

They climb a thousand steps to the top of the castle, perched on high rocks. They lock the door behind them, with the key Toast had kept from the ring. They pull the knife from the place they hid it, wrapped in sacking, sharp as the razors Angharad uses to mark her face. They hold hands and they do not pray.

When he breaks an axe through the door, they are ready.

Five live in a castle, and the shadow does not cover anything more than it should. There are fields that glow with growth, and children run through grass taller than they are, and the castle’s door is open for anyone who would enter with good intention. There used to be a red room, but it is a shrine now, to the five women who died there. There used to be a husband, tall and cruel, but he is dead now, and his body is rotted and gone. The woman who killed him sleep in Angharad’s room still, entangled. The woman who killed him do not dream of blood. The woman who killed him are their own, and each others, and they rule with love, perched on high rocks.


	5. firsts (capable/angharad, furiosa/valkyria, furiosa/max)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> first loves, and seconds, and thirds.
> 
> capable/angharad, furiosa/valkyrie, furiosa/max.

In the vault, Capable tells her sisters that it does not count. There is touching, and love, and other sweet things that aren’t like what Joe gives them. She had known love, out in the wastes, a girl with grey eyes, a boy with black hair. She’d been plucked from the desert older than most, a girl with most of a life, stolen from people who loved her back.

“You’ll have first loves,” she tells them. “And second and thirds.”

“When we’ve proven we are not mothers,” says Cheedo bitterly.

“If he doesn’t kill us first,” says Toast, rubbing at the bruise along her cheekbone, the only visible sign of the punishment for her cut-short hair.

Capable doesn’t say anything to that. She looks at Angharad, who is looking at her already, with her eyes half closed and her mouth with kisses in the corners. Capable cannot look at Angharad for long and she busies herself pinning her braids into a blood-coloured crown and when she looks up again, Angharad has gone. Capable has had a first love, and a second, and Angharad is her third. She hopes her sisters can all be so lucky.

 

Furiosa has all of her firsts in the green place. Her first kiss, Valkyrie with her forehead cut to the bone and her lips sticky with blood. Kit, the Vuvalini healer, says that she is lucky she still has her eye, and Furiosa kisses her, overwhelmed by the thought that any part of Valkyrie might disappear.

She has her first kill there too. A raider in spiked armour, foolish enough to ignore the warning signs that border the green place. Furiosa doesn’t think about it, she calls to him to leave, and he ignores her, and she calls again, and he keeps moving forward, and she drops him to the floor with a bullet through his eye. Her hands feel numb against the trigger. She thinks of kissing blood from Val’s lips. She thinks of the crows that are growing in number. She takes what is salvageable from the body, and buries him on the edges of their territory, where the swamp creeps.

 

“I had a wife,” Max tells Furiosa one day, sitting on one of the rope and plank bridges, a thousand feet up. “A child too, I think.”

“Just names and ghosts,” Furiosa says, thinking of Valkyrie. “You cannot hurt them anymore.”

Max looks at her, and he is frowning slightly, and he wets his lower lip with his tongue like he’s going to speak, but he presses his tongue to his teeth instead. Furiosa can guess what he’s thinking, the guilt of failing to save someone, she has it too. Valkyrie had come back with her after barely a moment’s thought, and Furiosa had lead her into death. 

“They know what they’re doing, attaching themselves to us,” she says, as much to herself as to him.

Max nods, and looks at his hands, and nods again. Furiosa thinks that perhaps he is a first for her too. The first to understand the person she is now, spat out by the Citadel. The first able able to fit comfortably against what is left of her. She takes his hand, and turns it palm up in her lap, and traces the lines in his skin with a finger, dirt and dust. He takes this patiently, and silently, and when she sighs, and takes her hand away from his, his fingers curl in like they mourn the loss of the touch. Perhaps she is a first for him too, she thinks, and she leans her head against his shoulder.

 

In the vault again, with grief spelled out in every pore, Capable counts her loves. A girl called Ash, a boy called Breakneck, a girl called Angharad, a boy called Nux. Her sisters, and Furiosa, and Miss Giddy. Different kinds of love, all of them, different kinds of firsts. She watches Dag and Cheedo and thinks perhaps they will have what she and Angharad had, for too brief a time, when Cheedo is older, and Dag has stilled her shaking bones. Toast, she thinks, will put her love into metal, and speed, and she will carve her name into the packed earth road.

Capable is not sure what she will do. She thinks she will love the world, and that is a first too, loving the place that has burned her to the core. But there are children there, and there are people who need help, and people who cannot ask for it, and people who will not take it. That she is able to love at all is a miracle, she thinks, and she will not waste it.


	6. singing (cheedo/dag)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> cheedo/dag

When Immortan Joe first calls her fragile, Cheedo thinks that it must be a wonderful thing, to be cotton-swaddled and breakable. He touches her cheek, and she shivers, and bites the inside of her cheek so it doesn’t show. She is a one-day bride, and the others are lots of things, splendid and knowing, but she is _fragile_. A feather in the wind. A cloud sat low on the horizon.

“You’re not fragile, you’re a bird,” says the one with white hair, the Dag, when Immortan Joe is gone. Cheedo folds her arms around herself, and frowns.

“You’re jealous,” says Cheedo, tilting her head, and the Dag laughs, and uncertainty wriggles itself under her skin.

When Immortan Joe comes next, he hurts the girls, her friends, her sisters, and Cheedo thinks that perhaps because she is fragile, he won’t hurt her. Fragile things break. She remembers Dag’s laughter, Dag who is crying now, and she sits on the edge of her bed, and she doesn’t say anything, but she is there until the crying stops.

The windows of their vault creates shadows on the floor. Long lines and crosses. Cheedo flicks water at the glass to make the shadows fainter, to make them swirl with rippled sunlight, to make it look less like a cage. She is not a bird, she decides, glaring at Dag across the room. She is fragile, and she is beautiful, and precious, and sweet, and every other word Immortan Joe uses when he touches her hair.

“You’re not fragile,” says Toast, cocking her head to one side, “any more than Angharad is splendid.”

“But I suppose you’re _knowing_ ,” Angharad laughs.

“We’ll I’m not a bird,” Cheedo mutters, irritated, and Angharad only laughs more.

“A bird with clipped wings,” Dag says. “But we’ll keep you.”

Cheedo goes to her bed, and curls up under the sheet, and buries her face in her hands. She does not cry, she only scowls, and brings her shoulders up to her ears, and digs her fingernails into the bridges of her cheekbones. These girls, (her friends, her sisters), ought to be kinder to her, she thinks. She is _fragile_.

“Sing for me,” Immortan Joe tells her, and Cheedo does. Her voice is hoarse, and wobbly, and altogether terrible, and when Immortan Joe laughs, her insides turn hot.

“I’m not a _bird_ ,” she snaps, and when he slaps her across the face, she staggers and falls. Dag is yelling, and Angharad is soothing, and Joe leaves his anger behind him when he storms out of the Vault. Cheedo can taste blood in her mouth.

“You’re okay,” says Dag, kneeling beside her on the floor, and she dabs at Cheedo’s mouth with her dress, and it comes away red.

“He didn’t break me,” says Cheedo wonderingly, sitting up, and the heat in her is gone, replaced by something dull, and numb, and grey.

“You’re not fragile,” says Capable, standing over her.

“We’re leaving,” says Angharad. “We’re not the names he gives us. We’re not _things_.”

They do leave, and Cheedo only breaks once, and the girls, (her sisters, her _soul_ ), put her back together and never speak a word of blame. When she stands up for Furiosa, she is hot inside again, wild fire and desert sun, the girl who isn’t fragile, who isn’t a bird in a cage, who isn’t beautiful, and precious, and sweet. Who isn’t weak.

In the Citadel, thousands of days later, she has Dag’s daughter on her shoulders, and they are walking through green. There is dirt under Cheedo’s fingernails, and on her face, and Angharad has a handful of her hair in her chubby hand, and the shadows the sun draws out are warm, and comforting. They are going to find Dag among her flowers, and when they get there, Angharad will slide down Cheedo’s back to the floor, and Cheedo will take Dag’s hand, and kiss it, even though she knows it will taste bitter green. They avoid the Vault still, and its long shadows, but the Citadel feels less and less like a cage every day.


	7. incoherent (furiosa)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> furiosa knows that words are wind.

Furiosa knows that words are wind. She is young when she is taken, and she spends nearly one hundred days trying to talk herself out of the tower she is placed in, and Immortan Joe does nothing but put her in a muzzle with a leather bit between her teeth. Her words burn, and bubble, and settle down deep somewhere, and she pulls strips of skin from her lips, and she is silent.

She keeps her words behind her teeth, and she gives birth to blood, and Immortan Joe throws her to the Wretched. Words can be used to gain power, and to take it, she thinks. When Joe calls himself _redeemer_ , she cuts off her hair. Words can be used to give life, and to take it, she thinks. When Joe turns his back on the Wretched, she unstitches her insides, and lets her words out (just a few). Words like _War Boy_ and _V8_ and _chrome_. Words that get her painted black and white. The oldest War Boy anyone can remember, except for the Ace, who has been practically ancient since forever.

The words that she lets out are not her own. They are Joe’s words, and his metal god’s words, and the words of a thousand, thousand days under scorching sun, on burnt earth. Her words are a twisting, tearing cramp in her stomach. Her words are acid that threatens the back of her throat every time she opens her mouth. Her words are Buzzards in spiky cars, ripping her insides to shreds when her forehead is painted black and she is named Imperator. (Another word he’s fed to the people who open their mouths to him).

In the Vault, a half-remembered place, (the place that took her words), Furiosa watches his wives and keeps her teeth pressed tight together. They are like she was. They have fire in them. (They are like she _is_ , they know how hard it is to stay alive, and how hard it is to try so hard). She watches them, and her words rattle her teeth. _We are not things_ , says Angharad, and her swallowed words scream out their agreement. _**We are not things**_ , says Angharad, and Furiosa feels closer to the Green Place she was taken from than she has in so many thousands of days.

On the sands, on her knees, (things given to her, and taken away), her words break her teeth, and she screams out a sound that is all of them, and none. Afterwards she is dried out, and exhausted, and devastated. (Afterwards her throat hurts, and she is alive, and _they_ are alive). There is a hole in her stomach where her words used to be (where the Green Place used to be, where a girl used to be). She feels empty, and light, and Max says _together_ , and she sows that word into her skin, so it might grow into something large enough to fill everything they have lost.


	8. forgiveness (furiosa + the ace)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> furiosa & the ace

Furiosa can’t say that she’s surprised when Ace walks into the skin shop. She is recovering still; she is bandaged tight, and eating soup, and feverish with gifted blood; and Ace walks in. Both of his eyes are black and purple and yellow at the edges. His nose is broken. He is limping. He is sneering under the sunset of his bruises.

“You’re slow dyin’,” he says.

“You make an ugly corpse,” she snaps back.

There is a pause, and it’s as awkward as it should be. Furiosa rolls her shoulders back to make the bandages pull at her sides, so it’s more uncomfortable still. Ace had been a case of friendly fire. Morsov too, and the others. They knew what it meant to be a War Boy, especially Ace. She wonders how many of them are wandering around the honeycomb hallways of the Citadel, looking to send her to Valhalla. There are guards at the skin shop for a reason. She wonders why Ace had been allowed to get through. She wonders where he’d got the shirt and the water to wash the paint off. She would have mourned him, she realises.

“I know why you did it,” Ace says, running over her when she opens her mouth to speak.

“Yes,” she says slowly, sitting up straighter, arranging the blankets over her legs. “Killing me won’t bring Joe back.”

“No,” Ace cracks his knuckles. “I don’t reckon it’ll do much for me either.”

“So what do you want? You’re not a War Boy now, and I’m not an Imperator. Why are you here?”

“Just checkin’ those old bags you brought back know what their doing. You got water? Boss?”

Furiosa blinks. And sits up straighter still. And narrows her eyes. Ace is looking at her with an aggressive sort of calm, like he’s daring her to say something, and she doesn’t take the bait. She relaxes into the battered car-foam cushion behind her. She hoods her eyes and uncurls her fingers from their fists.

“You’ve got better things to do than this,” she murmurs. “Find Toast, she’ll need your help.”

“I thought you weren’t an Imperator,” he says, but he’s grinning now, and she might almost be smiling too.

“Bother someone else.”

“Apology accepted,” he says, and he’s gone before she can open her mouth to protest.

She shuffles back into the cushions, grumbling, and scowling, and then smiling. She would have mourned him. She would have missed him. She has nothing to apologise for, but she’s glad he’s not dead. Maybe that’s the same thing.


	9. books (miss giddy + the girls)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> miss giddy and her girls and books

Rictus Erectus has a mother who collects books. 

Her name is Hish and Rictus is taken from her and named without her and she is given a book. The book is called _The Hundred Dresses_ and it is a book for children and Miss Giddy uses it to teach Hish, and Shift, and Matilda how to read. It does not make much sense to the wives, it is from a different world, but they dream of their own hundred dresses and of being able to move away with a word, from the people who are cruel to them, from the people who spin the lock to their Vault. From the people who give them children and then take them away.

Miss Giddy tells Immortan Joe that his wives must be the rarest of rare things, angels in their tower, knowledgeable of all things written, there are illnesses of the mind, she tells him, and he gives them more books to keep her quiet. Miss Giddy tattoos this on her arms, along with _Hish _and _Shift_ and _Matilda_ and she tells them that they are seeds, and that seeds grow.__

__Matilda is thrown away when she bears three dead children. Hish gives her a page of _The Hundred Dresses_ because they think that Tilly will only be going back to the Wretched. But Joe tears the paper from her clenched fist, and Matilda kneels at an alter with silver paint dripping from her mouth and her white gown turns red when they open her throat to Joe’s Gods. They turn their backs on her when she dies. She has no witness._ _

__Shift dies giving birth to something dead and Hish screws up a page of a book about impossible plants and forces it between her stone teeth and Joe slaps her so hard her cheek blooms blue. Miss Giddy tattoos this on the soles of her feet._ _

__Hish dies with one of her hundred dresses looped around her throat and Immortan Joe fills his Vault with books. His new wives will not have sickness in their minds. His new wives will be angels in his tower._ _

__Girls die in the Vault, and they live, and they grow. Miss Giddy has all of their names written on her skin. Rictus grows too and he never knows his mother’s name, but the girls in the Vault are kind to him and he thinks he might know something of what a mother feels like. Immortan Joe stops giving their blood to his Gods when they won’t give him babies. He throws them to the Wretched instead. It’s the same thing. Miss Giddy and her books and her words can’t save them._ _

__Angharad comes and she is no different than any other. She is golden and bright. She reads everything she can with her lip bitten and her forehead creased. She asks questions that Miss Giddy doesn’t know the answers to. She recites passages to the sun. And then Capable arrives and they twine themselves together and learn about satellites and chlorophyll and sea anemones. Extinct things. Dag comes next and she eats the words from the page and spits out jokes and tiptoes her fingers up the walls. Miss Giddy tattoos her fingers when she asks. Toast is born out of the Bullet Farm and Joe treats her like the trigger on a gun. Her freckles and her mouth and every part of her shivers with defiance and only Angharad can gentle it. Cheedo is the last, and she puts her hands behind her back when she reads out loud, and Dag kisses her temples and her hair. These girls suck up words like the yellow earth sucks up water and Miss Giddy can feel her brittle heart breaking for them. They will be her last, she knows, she cannot survive any others._ _

__Furiosa reads only maps, and when she knows the maps better than the lines on her palm, she reads the road. She takes the girls when they ask because she had been one of them once, a girl thrown away, and because Miss Giddy asks her to. They take only one book, _The Hundred Dresses_ , missing pages and soft and stained with age, but important because it was the first. The seed. They lose it on the Fury Road but they only cry for Angharad._ _

__Later, when they go back, they read their books to war pups to give them something more than war. Furiosa is there sometimes, and Max too, periodically hauled back from the Wastes. The remaining Vuvalini act as translators for unknowable things of the old world._ _

__Miss Giddy is not there, but she is in every page all the same, and Angharad too, and every girl who had his skull burned into her skin. The Vault becomes the Library and Dag’s plant nursery and Cheedo’s sunlight room. Once it was a tower of angels._ _


	10. trajectory (furiosa/valkyrie)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> furiosa/valkyrie

In the Green Place, there are two girls. One with hair as black as night, and eyes like silver, and hands like ash; and one with hair as bright as sand, and eyes like wells, and hands like flames. They steal their mother’s bikes, and drive rings into the sand, and they shoot cans off fences, and no one scolds them because the rings in the sand and the holes in the cans are the future of their home.

Valkyrie holds Furiosa’s hand, on a tire-bare hill, and they are not old enough that it means something, but they are old enough to know that it does not mean nothing either. Furiosa leans her head on Val’s shoulder. Val stares hard at the flat line of the horizon, and thinks that she can see her whole life spread out ahead of her. The ground under her wheels, a gun over her shoulder, Furiosa warm against her side.

In the Green Place, there is one girl. With hair as black as night, and eyes like silver, and hands like ash. She is lucky she is still alive. She is lucky she is still there at all. She knows this is true, but she doesn’t feel lucky. She builds her own bike, out of the pieces Furiosa and her mother left behind, and she drives rings into the sand. She shoots cans off fences, and then puts them up again, and blows the first hole wider. And then she shoots crows, and collects their feathers, and braids them into her hair. But she cannot kill them all. In the evenings she thinks of hands like flames.

Valkyrie holds Furiosa’s shoulders, on a sand-strewn desert. They are older now, and it doesn’t mean what it did when they were young, it means something larger, and heavier, and quieter. Furiosa’s eyes are full of tears, more like wells than ever, deep and dark and impossible. _Impossible_. Later, Val stares at the flat line of the horizon, and thinks that she can see her whole life spread out ahead of her. The ground under her wheels, a gun in her hands, a scar down her cheek and ten thousand dead birds on her shoulders, and Furiosa. Warm against her side.


	11. nightmares (max/furiosa)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> max/furiosa

There is a man in her dreams, and he never speaks. He stands, his shoulders hunched in, his hands on the triggers of guns, the hilts of knives. There is blood in his eyes, and a fist-sized hole in his chest, and Furiosa leans over to see through to the desert on the other side. He never speaks, but he takes her hand, and he presses it to the wound, and sand falls out around her fingers. Then he moves her hand to his face, and she leaves her fingerprints on his skin, and the sand has covered her feet, passed her shins, her thighs, her waist, and it’s rising still.

She wakes up gasping, with her cheeks wet with tears, and her hands tangled in the blanket. She keeps her eyes shut for a moment, until her breathing levels out and her joints stop aching with tension. This is the third night in a row she has dreamed of Max. (The third night in a row she’s slept without the aid of drugged milk for pain). She sits up, pressing her hands down the seams of the bandages around her waist, feeling for the wetness of blood she is so sure must be there. It’s not, of course, the cloth is dry, and her hands are dry, and her wound was stitched up neatly weeks ago. She swipes her wrist across her cheeks, drying the tears too, and she gets to her feet.

She doesn’t allow herself to think of unfinished things. Loose threads, scars unhealed. She doesn’t allow herself to wish him back to her.

 

There is a woman in his dreams, and she whispers his name, over and over again. Sometimes she has one flesh hand, and one metal. Sometimes she has one flesh hand, and missing space. Sometimes she is just a figure, cut into the sky. She holds green things, and she pours water, and she lays her palm to his brow. She holds fire, and she burns him, and she puts her hand to his heart, and digs her fingers into his chest, and pulls it out still beating.

“You let us die,” she whispers.

He wakes up with words stuck in his throat, and his hands in fists, and his skin damp with sweat. He has been in the desert too long. She wasn’t dead when he saw her last. If she is he had no hand in it. If she is… He gets to his feet, rolls up the mat he uses to sleep, throws it into the back of the car with everything else. He fumbles with the blood-etched map he keeps on him always. Ten days, he reasons. Ten days until he can touch her, and prove to himself that she is real.


	12. petrichor (max/furiosa)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> max/furiosa

It does still rain on the ashes of the world. Sometimes it is acid and waves, and the Wretched are burned, and their bones splinter, and their skin peels. Sometimes it is as dangerous as the sand storms that strike lightning to the earth. But sometimes, very rarely, with years between, there will be a true rain. 

In the Citadel, before, the Wretched catch rain in the vessels they use for the water Joe allows them, and Joe hates the skies for giving away something he owns. After, when Joe is dead, and the water is free, the reservoir gets covered if dirty clouds smudge the horizon. They cannot risk contaminating the whole thing. And the Wretched still collect it for themselves because they can’t quite trust water they can take, and they know that it can’t last forever.

Furiosa remembers every one of her rains. In the green place, droplets on leaves, holding Valkyrie’s hand and opening their mouths to the sky. In the Citadel, a wife, her hand pressed against the dirty glass of her cage. Capable tells her that Angharad first spoke her words on a day when it rained, we are not things, and Furiosa remembers that rain too. She had been in the War Rig.

It is three hundred and sixteen days after Max left when it happens again. Furiosa isn’t counting for him, she is counting for history, for the words that Cheedo and Dag have started tattooing onto their skin (their histories must be read together). But on the three hundred and sixteenth day, it rains, and he comes back.

They take the lifts down, Furiosa and her girls, and she sits on the hood of one of the scout cars, and the girls dance. Toast rolls her sleeves over her shoulders and holds her arms above her head. Capable tips her head forward and the rain rolls down her neck. Dag sticks out her tongue. Cheedo jumps in puddles. Furiosa watches them, and smiles, and then Max is there, like the rain had grown him from the soil.

“It rained and I. I was close. And I thought…” Max shrugs a little, makes a face. His hair is dripping down his face. The rain is stopping already. Furiosa blinks down at him, from her seat on the hood of a card.

“Lots of unlikely things happening today,” she says finally.

Max makes a face like he disagrees, but he doesn’t say anything. He climbs up beside her, and his boots only slip once, and then he is sitting next to her, and they are watching their girls laugh. The sun is bright, and the ground is steaming, and everything smells alive. Furiosa leans back against the windscreen, tucks her flesh hand behind her head.

“You’ve made something good,” Max tells her, and she smiles.


	13. Cheiloproclitic (max/furiosa)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cheiloproclitic - being attracted to someones lips. max/furiosa.

Very rarely, when things are good, and quiet, Furiosa allows herself to think of Max. She does not remember much of the last part of their journey. She remembers his hands. She remembers his mouth. He has been gone for more than one hundred days, and she thinks of him in her carved-from-stone room. He whispers to her in her thoughts, and his lips brush her earlobe, the hinge of her jaw, her neck. She wonders at how someone can look so soft and so hard at the same time.

“Why don’t you speak of him?” Cheedo asks one day, and Furiosa feigns ignorance and goes to her carved-from-stone room and thinks of his hands. His mouth. She licks her lips. She takes apart her guns, and cleans them, and puts them back together, to do something with her hands, to stop her wondering at the ways she might touch him.

He comes back. He comes back and he comes to her still sand-burnt from the wastes. It has been two hundred and thirty six days. She has thought of him on every one of them. He stands in front of her, shifting his weight. She looks at his hands. His mouth. He looks warm and alive in her carved-from-stone room. She counts out weapons in her head to keep from stepping forward.

“I have…I found a kid. Redhead has her.”

“Capable,” Furiosa says faintly. “She teaches them.”

Max nods, and brushes his hands together, and licks his lips. Furiosa feels her cheeks prickle with something unfamiliar and uncomfortable and forgotten. She wants to look away but he keeps her caught somehow. He steps forward.

“Dag had her baby,” she says loudly, and he freezes in place. “A girl.”

He hums out an acknowledgement, and his eyes are lazy now, almost amused. The corners of his mouth get deeper, like he might smile. His lips look dry and cracked and soft as clouds and Furiosa stretches her fingers out until they click. She will be lost if he smiles, she thinks.

“Are you staying long?” she asks, squaring her jaw, setting her feet, and something moves through him like a wave, and he licks his lips again, and she feels a little bit like knocking him off his feet just to get him to stop.

“If you’ll have me,” he says, slow and low, and she narrows his eyes, and the corners of his mouth deepen further, and his eyes get caught in light. She is being laughed at, she realises.

“Come here,” she snaps, and his smile turns full, and real, and impossible.

He is flush against her in two strides, and his hand encircles her wrist, and his other hand hovers at her waist, and his mouth is wet, and his breathing is slow and even, but it trembles on the edges, and Furiosa relaxes. Furiosa smiles. Furiosa kisses him. And he feels exactly as she imagined he would.


	14. Apodyopis (max/furiosa)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Apodyopis - the act of mentally undressing someone. max/furiosa.

Furiosa wears her clothing like it’s a part of her body. The leather at her waist keeps her metal arm in place after all. She is made of many things and Max thinks he could never know all of them.

He does not go back right away. For a hundred days he stays out on the sand and he thinks of her. More often than not she breaks through the dead things that hide underneath his eyelids. She keeps him company. He remembers things he hadn’t thought to notice when he was with her. The folds in the white fabric of her shirt, stained with sand and grease and blood. Three shades of leather, soft and cracked and strong still where the belts pull across her stomach. That is where he starts.

This imagined Furiosa does not smile at him. She watches him, and her mouth sits soft, and her face is clean of Citadel war paint. Her flesh hand ghosts across the leather at her waist, and she tugs the ends back, pulls them from the buckles, and lets her metal arm fall. It’s something black after that, something rigid, something that knows the curve of her waist and the brace of her ribs. That falls to the floor next, a twist of her hand behind her back and it’s loose, slipping over her hips, and she steps out of it, toward him. Her feet are bare.

Then fall the belts at her hips, and only soft fabric is left, creams and browns. He does not let the cruel metal of Joe’s symbol into these thoughts. She pulls the white shirt, with it’s folds like bandages, over her head with one hand. It is a graceful gesture; there is no clumsy catching on elbows; she doesn’t get caught in the neck. It’s there one moment, and then gone, a puddle of fabric at her her feet.

Her skin is gold and brown and there is sand caught in the translucent hairs on her arms. Her eyes are hooded, her mouth still soft. She unbuttons her trousers next, and swivels her hips to help the fabric slide past her thighs, her knees, her calves. And she tilts her chin at him, naked in the desert in Max’s head, and she wets her lips with her tongue. She is sand for miles and water forever.

That is as far as he goes. Death creeps in if he thinks he might touch her. The Sprog tells him she is waiting for him and a thousand others tell him she has died. A hundred days might be enough, he thinks, and he makes a mark on his map, and he turns back to her.


	15. gifts (max/furiosa)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> wasteland gifts. gen. max/furiosa.

When Angharad becomes pregnant, Immortan Joe gives her gifts. A book about birds, a silver-backed mirror, guitar strings. She gives the book to Dag, who likes to think she can fly, and the mirror to Cheedo, who flashes messages to Toast on the ceiling, and the guitar strings to Capable, who plays a song about someone named Margaret who dies of a broken heart.

All of them pass on anything he gives them, like it draws his touch away from them, like it scratches out his name. He is generous with books but the girls thank Miss Giddy and smile at him with closed mouths. He gives them pools of water but the girls thank Miss Giddy for that too and turn away from him before he’s finished speaking.

“Little rebellions,” whispers Dag around her knuckles, and Angharad can taste their victory it’s so close.

Max gives gifts too, though no one calls them that. Like a boot or a steering wheel. Like a red skull on a map. Like blood. He comes back sometimes, while the Citadel is being remade, and he’s never empty handed. Everything he brings with him he gives to Furiosa who knows who it’s meant for. Tiny sprouts of green kept in the hollows of whatever vehicle he has, Furiosa passes those on to Dag. The stray children in rags with tyre-burnt fingers, she shuffles them on to Capable. Bullets go to Toast. Everything else goes to Cheedo and she, in turn, passes whatever-it-is on to the Wretched. Clothes and food and polished pebbles. Furiosa keeps nothing for herself. His blood was enough, she thinks.

One day he comes back without anything, just himself, in worn leather and worn skin and worn bones. He stands before her with empty hands that will probably always shake, and eyes that move around the room, pulling out secrets, and fire, and blood. Furiosa knows instantly that he has come back for good, and that it’s _not_ a gift, because people can’t be given to anyone, but she is glad to have him all the same.

“Come here,” she says, and he falls into her.


	16. water (cheedo + max/furiosa)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> dreams of water. gen. cheedo. max/furiosa

Max dreams of water. He is two weeks gone from the Citadel and he’s sucking on pebbles and chewing on cactus and his dreams are not tearing hands and lava, his dreams are water. Furiosa opens her hands to him, and the water bubbles and pours from her palms, and then she presses her hands to his face so he can drink. He wakes up dried out, stretched thin, and gasping. He digs his car out of the sand bank he’d buried it in, and drives so fast he can’t feel anything.

In the Citadel, Furiosa is drowning. The former Wretched pull her one way and the girls, her sisters, pull her the other, and there are children who cannot be washed clean of Valhalla, and some of them call her Imperator still, and it hurts her teeth it feels so wrong. She does not want to rule. She does not want to be named. She does not want to hold the Citadel and water and the world. She thinks of Max, out in the yellow desert on burning wheels, and she doesn’t want that either, but it does seem simpler. She pours water onto the earth and watches it disappear, and she is thrilled by the waste, and ashamed, and terrified. Max comes back and he doesn’t call her anything. She presses her forehead to his, and her hand to his neck, and the breath she takes is like her first.

Cheedo cries an ocean of tears. Angharad used to tell her not to waste her water, even though they had a whole pool of it in the vault, but Cheedo would cry all the same, and her tears would dry to salt and sometimes Dag would lick her cheeks to make her laugh. She cries now still, in the Citadel, Furiosa’s new Green Place, Joe’s old prison. She cries because everything is so new and hard and she is frightened. Capable holds her hands and braids her hair. Toast tugs on the braids and ignores her and sleeps next to her.

“Give your tears to the plants,” says Dag, as they watch her seedlings grow, and Cheedo smiles, and digs her hands into the earth, and grows.


	17. birthday (max/furiosa)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> wasteland birthdays. max/furiosa

In the wasteland time is measured in days. It feels too hopeful to use anything more than that, like you might live to see it, like you might _want_ to. It seems more likely that one day the sun just won’t set and the whole world will finally be burned to ash, as it has threatened for longer than anyone can remember. Furiosa counts her days from point to point. _I was stolen at five thousand days old, I became an Imperator six thousand days later, I found the green place a thousand days after that_.

Months and years are ignored as relics, counted only by those foolish enough to keep hope close. Birthdays are the same, except to a select few like Immortan Joe who count the birth of a healthy baby as some great feat, some great proof, some great reason to keep girls in cages and boys half-dead and begging for glorious suicide. Rictus had a birthday, and Corpus too. None of the girls have a birthday but all of them, together, pick the day that Furiosa stole them.

“Born on the same day,” says Dag gravely. “All sprung fully formed from the head of Furiosa.” (Most of the books in the Vault are Dag’s).

“From the head of Angharad too,” Cheedo corrects, and they all smile.

Their day is bright sunlight and water on sand and a pair of bolt cutters. Their day is green.

Furiosa finds times that feel familiar to her. Close, like the steel that lines her bones. If anyone asked her if she had a birthday she would deny it, but secretly she chooses days so hot she feels her skin will melt off her bones. Days when tires stick to gravel and her metal arm burns anyone who touches her. A day every summer where tar bubbles under her skin in glorious, poisonous bubbles. _It has been eight hundred days since Max gave me his blood and left_ , she thinks, but he is under her skin, just like the heat.

Max comes back. _It has been more than one thousand days_ , thinks Furiosa. Max comes back and he is scorched red from the sun and she is sweat-slick and burning, and it is _her_ day. She takes him by the hand, and he lets her, and she leads him up high onto one of the criss-crossing walkways of the Citadel. They sit a hundred feet over everything. She does not let go of his hand.

“Today is…” Furiosa begins, and she wrinkles her nose. “I am older, today.”

Max looks at her with his head tilted, like he is studying her age, looking for some sign that she has changed in the thousand days he has been gone. He must find something, because his expression quiets, settles, calms, and he sighs.

“Me too,” he says, and he takes her hand, and carefully matches it with his, fingertip to fingertip, twin calluses and blisters and scars.

“Happy birthday,” Furiosa says, a phrase from a story book, and she laughs, and Max smiles, and they share the hottest day in a burnt world.


	18. dance (max/furiosa)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> max and furiosa dance

It’s Dag’s idea. They’d been given instruments in the Vault, but she was too caught up in her hands to be good at the guitar, and too caught up in her head to play piano, so the gramophone was hers. There were not many records to play and the ones she did have skipped sometimes and warped sometimes. But it was music and she played her songs over and over again and they never got old. And she leaves them behind when they run and they are waiting for her when they come back and then she is murmuring along with her music and Max is back for a bit and Furiosa is sitting next to him, leaning against the wall, and their shoulders dip toward each other, and Dag has an idea.

Cheedo is essential, though she does not know it yet. Dag gets to her feet, and sets the record playing. _I go out walking, after midnight, out in the moonlight, just like we used to do_. She pulls Cheedo to her feet and Cheedo frowns and then smiles and lets her. Dag spins her in a circle, Dag sways with her along to the music, a rolling, night-bathed, song. Capable taps her foot. Toast shakes out her limbs and takes Cheedo by the hand as Dag spins her away across the floor.

“Furiosa,” Dag says, raising her arms above her head, crooking a finger.

“No,” Furiosa says, but she is smiling.

“Dance with Max then,” Dag insists, and behind her Toast smothers a laugh with her hand and Cheedo kicks Dag’s ankle with bare feet.

“No,” Max says and he is not smiling, but his eyes are hooded and his expression is soft.

“Cowards,” Toast says and Cheedo dips her low and she wriggles out of the younger girls arms, laughing.

“It’s easy,” Dag points out, and ducks down to her knees, sets the song playing again. _I’m always walking, after midnight, searching for you_.

“I know,” Furiosa laughs.

“Prove it,” Cheedo challenges.

Furiosa gets to her feet then and Dag holds her breath and ghosts her hands over the spinning record and gets to her feet and presses her mouth to Cheedo’s hair. Toast has her eyes narrowed. Cheedo has her hands clasped together.

“Max?” Furiosa asks, holding out her metal hand, and Max blinks once, looks momentarily furious, and then soft again, and he lets her pull him to his feet.

It’s not dancing. Not really. It’s Max with his hands at Furiosa’s waist, it’s Furiosa with her arms draped over Max’s shoulders. It’s shuffling steps that might, almost be in time to the music. But Furiosa has her eyes closed, and she is smiling. And Max is staring at her like he has never seen anything like her, in any world, and it’s him who moves closer to her, sliding his hands around to the small of her back. Furiosa’s smile widens, but they are so close Dag is sure he can’t see it.

Toast elbows her in the ribs, grinning. Cheedo looks almost unbearably satisfied. Capable is still tapping her foot, still sitting on the floor, but her smile is bright and her eyes are bright and _she_ is bright. Their little family, thinks Dag, and she sets the record playing again, and Max and Furiosa sway.

 _I walk for miles along the highway, well that’s just my way, of saying I love you. I’m always walking, after midnight, searching for you_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i forgot this one somehow idk.

**Author's Note:**

> these have all been posted previously on tumblr @oneangryshot thanks!


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